According to La Biennale, the exhibition of repurposed building materials pulled from inner-city American churches addresses “the question of the recurring dissolution and demolition of church parishes in African American and Hispanic neighbourhoods across the United States.”

Does that sound a little opaque? Well, fortunately the artist offered us a bit more insight into the show, when he was one of the special guests at Phaidon's London conference last week. “A big part of the practice has to do with the relocation of materials,” he explained at a company get together. “If there is spiritual potency inside of certain materials, then I’m constantly trying to reawaken that potency to reanimate that animist being inside.”

Gates speaking at the Phaidon conference last week

Yet don’t think of this as a simple salvage job. “I don’t think about my work in terms of reclamation,” Gates explained. “I think of it more as, there’s life inside of these materials that people don’t see and it’s my job to make that life as evident. There was [material which] seemed lifeless in Chicago, and by relocating that seemingly lifeless stuff to Venice, I feel like we’ve been able relocate a complicated mix of materials and maybe even deep spirituality to a place that was known for its Catholicism and known for its secularisms. I’m trying to reintroduce some of these materials, to gain some deep sense of history in Venice.”

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